Nintendo claims that the GameCube has doubled its market share to 37 percent since its recent price cut.

Nintendo has today announced that since cutting the price of its GameCube console, its market share has risen from 19 percent to 37 percent. The figures were announced by George Harrison, senior vice president of marketing and corporate communications at Nintendo of America, during Harris Nesbitt Gerard's Playtime 2003 Investor Conference in New York.

"In a tough economy, we've found the sweet spot on pricing, and players are grabbing Nintendo GameCube systems off the shelves at the fastest rate since the console's debut," said Harrison. "With an $80 price advantage over other systems and the impending launch of the mega-hit Mario Kart: Double Dash!!, this offer is just too good to resist."

According to NPD, Nintendo GameCube year-to-date sales for 2003 are two percent higher than last year while Game Boy Advance sales have increased by no less than 25 percent. In contrast, sales of Microsoft's Xbox dropped three percent and Sony's PlayStation 2 dropped 17.5 percent.

By Justin Calvert

Originally posted by The Franchise
This article implies that the GC owns ~40% of the VG market which I find a little hard to swallow since the sales of PS2 have dwarfed it for more than 2 years. So PS2 has 50% of the market and XBOX 10%? I doubt that. I want to see how they define market share. Anyone have any other figures that we can use to verify this claim?

Also Sony sales are down 17.5% year-on-year. This doesn't mean their market share is down 17.5% That might be obvious but numbers and figures can sometimes be spun into something completely different.

Originally posted by young
37% of what?

Originally posted by Galanthas
Nintendo claims that the GameCube has doubled its market share to 37 percent since its recent price cut.

I took it to mean since they cut the price to $99.99, not since the launch of the system.

Not sure what you mean by being spun into something completely different. That 17.5% didn't come from Nintendo it came from NPD which has no affliation with any of the console makers.

http://www.npd.com/

Originally posted by The Franchise
Wait so you're saying they define market share as everything sold since the price cut? You don't think that's a very misleading spin? Let's lower the price of the XBOX to $10 and see it outsell its competitiors by a margin of 100-1 and say the XBOX has 99% market share all of a sudden. Obviously that didn't happen, but my concern is the same. I would define market share as units sold since launch compared to total available market, otherwise you have to put some qualifier next to the figure.

Also for the 17.5% I was just clarifying that the sales were down by that amount, not the market share. It was a clarification. I'm not doubting the accuracy of that figure.

EDIT: to add that I think balancer has the right interpretation, but I wouldn't define that figure as market share.

Originally posted by cheapskate
Wow! What did they do? Drop the price?

Originally posted by Galanthas
I never said it was or wasn't misleading, I'm just reporting the news and was giving insight into what I thought they meant by the first line in the news piece which was:

Nintendo claims that the GameCube has doubled its market share to 37 percent since its recent price cut.

All companies can be and are very misleading sometimes with sales numbers and what not, that's the reason I said in my first post:

No way to tell if the first part is accurate since it is coming from Nintendo.

Heh it wouldn't be the first or last time Nintendo had misleading sales numbers.

Originally posted by Josh Hinkle
Yes, the GC has been $99 for a month or so.

Originally posted by The Franchise
Wonder if XBOX or PS2 price cuts are coming and what affect they'll have.